Elaine Santantonio—Creating an efficient cyber workplace

She improved communication and increased efficiency by helping put mobile devices into the hands of Lab employees.

March 11, 2014

A recipient of the Lab’s 2014 Women Who Inspire awards, as the Network and Infrastructure Engineering (NIE) Division Leader, Santantonio helps provide technical communication and workplace infrastructure and services for the “desktop to teraflops” cyber workplace.

Santantonio urges young women beginning their careers to find the courage to believe in themselves, and to not be too humble to ask for help.

Creating an efficient cyber workplace

Having lived and worked all around the world managing networking—including Sweden, New Zealand, Oregon and Maryland—Elaine Santantonio may be the perfect person to improve mobility, communications and cyber security at Los Alamos National Lab.

From desktop to teraflops

A recipient of the Lab’s 2014 Women Who Inspire awards, as the Network and Infrastructure Engineering (NIE) Division Leader, Santantonio helps provide technical communication and workplace infrastructure and services for the “desktop to teraflops” cyber workplace.

While Santantonio may be worldly, she came from humble beginnings, the daughter of a farmer and the first in her family to graduate from college.

New passion leads to a career in computing and application development

She earned her master’s in biology from New Mexico State University and, passionate in statistics and programming, transitioned to computing and application development jobs far from her home.

She helped put mobile devices into the hands of Lab employees, praised for increasing efficiency and communication, but also introducing a substantial cyber security challenge for Santantonio and her team. Santantonio’s organization also provides the classified and unclassified network infrastructure and services the Lab.

Like mother, like daughter—courageous and ambitious

Inspired by her mother, who dropped out of high school to raise a family but returned to school and obtained her GED, Santantonio urges young women beginning their careers to find the courage to believe in themselves, and to not be too humble to ask for help.

September, 9 2014 - Ron Barber, a mechanical engineer in the Laboratory’s Accelerator Operations and Technology Division, combines his love of nature and open spaces with a personal interest in researching the astronomical knowledge of long-ago civilizations that once inhabited the American Southwest.

August, 26 2014 - Michael Torrez, by day a research technologist in the Laboratory's Materials Physics and Applications Division, spends much of his free time researching New Mexico's family histories.

August, 14 2014 - Jonathan (Jon) Engle, Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory, is helping lay the scientific groundwork for a new and improved cancer treatment that uses the energy produced by radioactive isotopes.

June, 24 2014 - Honig realized that she wanted to document the beauty and destructiveness of wildfires and the sacrifices, challenges and camaraderie of the men and women protecting communities in the path of scorching blazes.

June, 2 2014 - Monika Bittman has wanted to be an artist ever since she was a little girl in Prague, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. Today Bittman applies her creative eye and attention to detail in her work as a web designer at the Laboratory.

June, 2 2014 - From the end of March into early May, Keller and the Laboratory’s other wildlife biologists monitor the Mexican Spotted Owl’s population size and locations and record noteworthy changes.

Innovations for a secure nation

Scientists are developing an ultra-low-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging system that could be low-power and lightweight enough for forward deployment on the battlefield and to field hospitals in the World's poorest regions.